I don't know Bubble Sort. .. Does that make me a bad programmer? According to your test, I am.

Nope -- you never saw my carefully defined paragraph describing the bubble sort. I won't try to replicate it here, but I can assure you would have been able to read and understand it.

Perhaps your candidate was not being a smartass. Maybe he was like me, doesn't know any sorting algorithms by name, but he does know enough to write a program that works. So maybe he was just trying to make the best of a poor situation, trying to write any sorting function that works. And he succeeded.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that one.

And you threw away a likely very fine candidate, just because he doesn't think like you. Instead, you think you have him all figured out. Shame on you.

I had to make a decision based on the limited amount of information I had, and in a limited amount of time. I was constrained by a number of other items -- the pay wasn't that great, yet I was trying to fill a position that required decent C and Pascal, knowledge of data communications, as well as the ability to perform second line customer support and occasionally carry a pager. It was hard to find candidates that met all of those criteria.